It's ridiculous that you should actually need to provide any team an incentive for winning; all you need to do is remove the incentive for losing. One simple solution would be to rank the teams in terms of order in which they are mathematically eliminated from playoff contention (order in terms of games played, not chronological). This creates the potential problem that this can be affected by one conference being more competitive than the other, which is easily rectified by alternating the order of conferences. So for example, let's say Florida is the first team eliminated from playoff contention. They get the first overall pick. The second overall pick goes to the first western conference team to be eliminated. The third overall pick goes to the next team eliminated, and the fourth overall pick goes to the second team eliminated in the opposite conference from the third team.
As soon as a team is eliminated from playoffs, they have nothing to play for except pride. That should be enough to ensure that GMs manage their teams down the stretch in a way that rests players who shouldn't be playing but fields competitive lineups that also keep in mind player development.
And yes, it's still possible to tank, but if you're going to do so, you need to do so early. Having a rebuilding season where you're just going to focus on your young players and hope that this results in a high draft pick is a legitimate organizational strategy, as opposed to putting the worst possible team on the ice late in the season in hopes of artificially improving your standing.
Granted, it's not a perfect system and it would still suck for teams like the Flames who, this year, got on a bit of a hot streak between the time that they were practically eliminated from the playoffs but not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
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